Leading a Stress-Free Life

Till about 20 years ago, the word ‘stress’ was only a term in Science. It was not a part of our conversations to refer to our state of mind. Even during those years we worked as hard as we are working today, situations were equally challenging as they are today. Yet we never said “I feel stressed”. Slowly we started using it commonly as an emotion to describe our state of mind. We like to say that we are stressed, as an indicator that we are working very hard, even going above and beyond our regular duties. Let us check our understanding about stress.

We are originally happy, peaceful and powerful beings. Stress is a result of our creation of wrong thoughts. It is an emotional pain that indicates that something in us needs to change. But seeing everyone around us also going through stress, we tend to believe that experiencing a little stress is fine, natural, obvious and common in today’s times. That is not true. Stress has an impact on our physical and emotional well-being. It impacts our efficiency, memory, decision making ability and reduces our performance. Hence, any amount of stress is damaging.

In Science, STRESS is equal to PRESSURE divided by RESILIENCE.

Applying it in our lives:

PRESSURE = Our Situations (like targets, deadlines, exams, goals, issues in health, relationships)

RESILIENCE = Our Inner Strength (like purity, peace, power, happiness, bliss, wisdom, love)

Therefore STRESS is equal to OUR SITUATIONS divided by OUR INNER STRENGTH.

So when we increase inner strength, we decrease pressure and hence reduce stress. We become stable, peaceful and happy beings. But when our inner strength is low, even a small pressure creates high stress.

Our first responsibility in any situation is to take charge of our state of mind by increasing inner strength. It is the only entity in our control and not the situation, and gives us the power to face any situation.